This entire shoot is a blur for me. I didn’t make final lighting plans after the shoot, so I had to refer to BTS photos to reconstruct where out lights actually ended up. So this will be roughly 80% accurate.
Starting off with the simplest leg of the shoot - Kansas city. We needed to shoot only a couple of shots with Patrick, but we had 15 minutes with him, so we rehearsed out camera positions ahead of time, so we knew exactly where we’ll go. We even did a dress rehearsal with a stand in and we timed it to make sure we can shoot all 3 shots in 15 minutes.
The rest of the shoot took place in Bogota, Colombia several weeks later.
London street exterior was out last scene of the shoot, and perhaps the most complex one. We had to shoot around a lot of lighting and rain machines. Once again I couldn’t afford a condor, so I had to light from the ground. My usual go to method for night exteriors on a budget is focusing on lighting the background. I love Back-lighting trees especially, because they take hard light so nicely and add nice volume to the shot.
It’s usually hard for me to settle on the right color for scenes like this. Especially with LEDs it’s so easy to flick through colors and try many different combinations it becomes difficult for me to settle on something. I really dislike it when there are too many colors in one frame, so I try to find a combination of 2-3 colors that I’ll stick with for the scene.
Here I ended up with a neutral-warm color (kind of like desaturated sodium vapor), cool-green, and primary red. Given that this is a residential street, it made sense to me that it would have warm street lights and primary red is motivated by an imaginary traffic light.
We shifted a lot of units around as we moved through the coverage
Here the key light was a combination of a small Godox light with diffusion wrapped on it and the Forza 720 hitting from far away. We also added a Vortex to wrap the key. I think it was a Vortex 4 with a chimera. Another Vortex 4 was bouncing into a 4x4 from fill side, adding a touch of cool-green color to the shadows
Here she’s lit moslty with a Vortex 8 + 8x8 Light grid. and the light reflected in the background is a Vortex 4 bouncing into a 4x4 bounce
The bar location had a lot of wide shots planned, so I wanted to minimize lighting inside. The rooms weren’t particularly large, but they had tall ceilings, so there were opportunities to hide lights among the ceiling support beams. We hid a Vortex 4 in the smaller room and some titan tubes in the larger (bar) room.
Finishing with another simple setup. Our faux San Paulo street shots were pretty minimal - just a 4K and an 18K with 1/2 CTO providing an occasional backlight + some bounce boards and negative fill for close up shots. We got lucky with a partially overcast weather, so our units could actually provide a decent amount of exposure, even on wider shots.
